My thoughts:
Game runs perfectly, but that should be expected considering it doesn't look particularly good and the levels are all small.
Gunplay I love. All the weapons feel differentiated and yet still fairly powerful. Aiming prowess is an excellent combination of stats and player ability. Fuck anyone who thinks its sloppy or hard to use, it is perfect. If you know of a game where stat-based aiming is better implemented, I would really like to see it. The only (laughable) problem is that you fire bullets out of the camera instead of the gun. IE, if you can see around a corner, you can shoot around a corner even if your character is pointing his gun into the wall. Its up to the player to abuse that or not, though.
Sneaking is OK, the problem is more that levels are really constrained consolized. Its almost hilarious how every building has 4 ways to get in, including a front door, a side entrance with keycode, an entrance from a rooftop ladder and a wildcard entrance, yet the the building itself is about the size of my house. And every time you finish 2 rooms of a level you are forever barred from going backwards to previous areas. There just is no room to sneak around in most cases other then the developer-selected procedure of which way you can go.
Enemies spawning in out of thin air = lulz. My guess is that more then 4 enemies at a time slows down xbawkz so they decided to spawn in more enemies after you kill a few. Pisses me off when a guy with a rocket launcher appears right in the area I just cleared. I would be complaining about not being able to move bodies in the stealth section (seriously? how did they fucking leave that out?) but all bodies disappear if you move 15 feet and look away from them to help save xbawkz some memory. lol.
C&C is OK so far, I haven't finished the game. It seems limited mostly to +- 5-10% buffs which is hardly inspiring, but I'll still give the end a chance. It hardly seems like it should be the main advertising point of the game, though.
I've been completely bug free other then getting stuck inside a door once. I dunno if AI patrol routes are bugging up, sometimes they seem to stop patrolling way for a few minutes and just stand around but I'm not even sure if thats a bug. Your mileage may vary.
Enemy AI is simple, but I've hardly seen it do stuff that would make it seem as remarkably stupid as some people are saying. No running up to me backwards. It hears things annoyingly well, and if they are alert they are much better at finding you then when they are just standing around patrolling.
Overall, its an excellent game that feels cut short by consoltardation. If we had large open levels Deus Ex-style instead of what is it now, I would be prepared to name it GOTY. As it is, I'm still pleasantly surprised and would like to see a sequel with a few of the other obvious problems fixed.
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